Unofficial news and tips about Google

November 16, 2012

Export Google Reader Data in Google Takeout

When Google Reader dropped support for the built-in sharing features and integrated with Google+, the settings page added a long list of JSON files you could save to your computer to export your followers, the items you've shared or starred, your notes and more. Until then, you could only export your subscriptions.

Now all these files can be downloaded from Google Takeout, a service that lets you export data from Google+, Google Drive, Google Contacts, Picasa Web, YouTube and more. Reader is probably the only Google service that sends users to Google Takeout to export data.

Unfortunately, you need to download 8 files even if you only want to export the subscriptions OPML file. Google has to create a ZIP archive first, so you'll have to wait a lot more. Instead of downloading a small XML file, you need to download a large archive (34MB for my account). That's a general issue with Google Takeout, which only lets you download all your YouTube videos, all your Picasa Web photos, all your Google Drive files.

Another service recently added to Takeout is Google Latitude. You can download a JSON file with your location history data.

Let's hope that developers will create cool apps that parse these JSON files and make them more useful. Maybe Google should also offer human-readable formats like HTML.